Mike Gatto is a clever fellow. But like a lot of smart guys, he’s sometimes too clever for his good.

A case in point came a week ago when the AIDS Healthcare Foundation denounced the assemblyman as “a pornographer’s best friend” for blocking consideration of a bill that would require the use of condoms in all adult film production in California, a requirement approved by Los Angeles County voters last year.

The group’s president, Michael Weinstein, accused Gatto during a teleconference of “single-handedly” putting the measure on hold and refusing to let it come to a vote even when his stated concerns about its constitutionality were answered by a federal court judge in late August.

“He is serving the interests of the pornographers,” Weinstein said in announcing that 1,000 protest letters were being sent and a robo-call campaign to 100,000 of his constituents was under way.

What had happened was this: Back in May, Gatto, as chair of the powerful Assembly Appropriations Committee, put a hold on the bill, AB 332.

A month later the bill’s author, Assemblyman Isadore Hall (D-Compton) gutted another bill of his, one that dealt with regulating tobacco sales, and put the language of the condom measure in its place. The tobacco bill already had cleared the Assembly but when it was changed to a condom bill, it got stalled in the Senate Rules Committee because of what they call the “jailbreak rule.”

It is a long-standing rule of the legislature, one that is only violated in exceptional circumstances, that a bill held in a committee of one house cannot be taken up in the other house without the express permission of the committee chair, in this case Mike Gatto, or the Speaker, currently John Pérez.

“The protocol and accepted practice is we would not move the bill unless the leadership of the Assembly, meaning the Speaker, asked us to do so,” said Mark Hedlund, communications director for Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg.

Yet here’s what Gatto told the L.A. Times: “I don’t control the California Senate. I’m flattered, but there are two houses of government.”

And the Daily News: “I have not made any decisions. We’re really not quite sure what they are talking about. It’s clear they are trying to engage in some public brow-beating. It’s before the Senate. It’s not before me.”

There is no possibility that a guy as smart as Gatto doesn’t know the rules as well as anybody, so at the least his comments are misleading and disingenuous.

With several new cases of HIV infection in the adult film industry in less than a month, there are concerns of a serious outbreak that could get worse.

Opposition to the condom requirement has come from the adult film industry and the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., a leading voice of the business community in the San Fernando Valley, where for decades most of the nation’s pornography has been produced.

VICA President Stuart Waldman called the measure a “bad bill,” saying it contained no funding mechanism and “doesn’t really solve the problem.”

“This is a $6 billion industry just in the Valley,” Waldman said. “Requiring the use of prophylactics will drive this multibillion-dollar industry out of the state.”

Since passage last November requiring the use of condoms in L.A. County, the number of permits for adult filming has dwindled from 500 permits in 2012 to just two this year.

Thursday was the hectic last day of this year’s state legislative session, with intense wheeling and dealing going on, but Gatto agreed to answer my questions in writing.

I submitted emailed questions about why the condom bill was held in his committee and whether the last-minute negotiations on it were likely to lead to it going forward.

The key question was this: “How does the Assemblyman square his comments to the Times and Daily News with the ‘jailbreak rule,’ which is intended to prevent utter chaos and destruction of the committee system?”

In his emailed response, Gatto noted the bill was held “on suspense,” along with hundreds of others, “because of cost concerns,” litigation and enforcement costs in this case amid doubts about “whether such a law could ever be enforced.”

He suggested state inspectors might be required on film sets, saying, “Imagine a government official asking a filmmaker, ‘Excuse me Mr. Spielberg, but what will your upcoming film portray, and would you mind if we posted a monitor on the set?’”

He noted the bills, if passed, would not take effect for more than a year, so they would have no impact on reducing concerns about an HIV epidemic in the adult film industry and addressed the core question this way:

“As for the rest of your questions, I know even you can’t seriously expect me to try to prove a negative. The California Senate has its own rules, and I serve in the Assembly. I can tell you that the framers of our constitution put legislative procedures in place specifically to avoid hasty, emotional decisions, and prevent tactics that undermine the legislative process and committee procedures.”

His response ended: “It’s clear that AHF is trying to bully the legislature into spending taxpayer money, and that they don’t understand the legislative process. There are two houses of government, and I don’t have a vote in the Senate, let alone control it.”

He’s sticking to his guns and denying that there is a protocol of civility between the Assembly and the Senate, insisting the “jailbreak rule” does not have the force of law, so it is irrelevant.

So it’s not Mike Gatto’s fault the condom bill died as the session ended. Just ask him.

My connection with Robert the Walker started back in March with an emailed copy of his letter to Burbank officials about how much he loves the newly-opened Glendale Narrows portion of the Los Angeles Riverwalk and the sadness he feels seeing homeless people living there.

He didn’t get an answer to his question: “How about a couple of bucks to create a sanctuary for the homeless, vagrant scavengers that are living (on) your streets?” Several dozen emails followed in the ensuing months.

They contained pictures of the beauty of the Narrows and the ugliness of homeless people hidden in the nooks and crannies and the trash they leave around.

His missive at the end of August pushed me to take a greater interest: “Seeing some innocent kids going down to the river at night to have their fun, or a single woman walking her dog. Would these innocent folks represent an opportunity to the homeless who have nothing … this is a disaster waiting to happen.”

So I made a date for Robert the Walker’s Glendale Narrows tour — a date that coincidentally occurred the same morning last week when I got an email from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti about the city’s 232nd birthday. (Watch Garcetti’s video up the river with a paddle http://youtu.be/K9RHFMuJu3A)

“The L.A. River is the best-kept secret of Los Angeles! You can bike, kayak, walk and run throughout the 51-mile stretch with great scenery like Glendale Narrows and Atwater Crossing,” Garcetti wrote in explaining it was the public’s choice to use photos of the river to greet tourists arriving at Los Angeles International Airport.

Still, I was not prepared for the beauty, the serenity I encountered when I met up with Robert the Walker or the truly L.A. vista of natural beauty amid two massive freeways and steel-and-glass high-rises — the light and dark of a schizoid place in a single image.

We were at the start of the mile-long first-phase pathway, the exact point where Burbank, Glendale and L.A. meet — a political and law enforcement no-man’s land.

“This is a bird habitat, birds you don’t see every day,” Robert the Walker explained. “That’s a stilt over there. That black bird there, standing on the rock, that’s a cormorant. That channel over there is where the fish all come down, guys are around here all the time with fly rods.”

Before we’ve gone very far, we encounter a guy named John Pearson, who tends the native gardens of succulents and cactuses and who comes regularly to look after what he helped create as the Glendale Parks Department’s project manager for the Narrows.

“This was my baby, still is,” said Pearson, who retired a year ago. “We started this back in the late ’90s. It took a long time to get all the property issues resolved because of the overlapping jurisdictions and the easements we needed from Disney and others. Now I’m just a volunteer helping out.”

We resume our stroll and Robert the Walker points out what he sees in the river. “Look at the cormorant, he’s posing for you. There’s a green heron. A pair of black-hooded mergansers will spend the winter here. Oh, and there, right in the middle, is the common egret and some seagulls,” he said.

“How beautiful is that? That was me standing there at 17 looking at the world in wonder.”

At that point, the story of Robert the Walker starts to tumble out and I learn how, at the age of 68, this retired star salesman, actor, writer and so many other things winds up finding his calling as the self-styled janitor, gardener, photographer and policeman protecting this mile-long trail.

He is the son of a Syrian father and British mother and grew up in Dearborn, Mich., home base for the Ford Motor Company, at a time when Arabs were not very welcome.

At 17, he took his guitar and his Elvis Presley hair on the road, hitchhiking to L.A. in search of fame and fortune.

Half a century later, things didn’t quite work out the way he’d dreamed, but he made good money and got to live in New York and the Bay Area before winding up selling post-production services for TV and film projects in L.A.

His wife died nine years ago, their daughter has grown into womanhood and now he’s writing a book about the moral dilemma of someone happening onto a murder scene where $10 million is lying on the floor and no one is around.

Do you take the money and run or do you call the cops? Interesting guy, this Robert the Walker, who finally tells me his last name is Acey.

He tells me he lives down Riverside Drive in an apartment and how he walked nearly every day along the Equestrian Center trails that run all the way to Warner Bros. studios until the Glendale Narrows became his passion.

“It’s nature in the city, you got a cormorant and a stilt talking to each other,” he said. “This is peace and quiet and love. It’s spiritual. And yet we’ve got a problem waiting to happen. We can’t have crazies living in our park. They’re an intrusion, they don’t fit. We got to deal with it, come up with a solution.”

I run Robert the Walker’s “Get Up and Do Something” philosophy by Glendale Police Lt. Bruce Fox, who has spoken with him many times and who shares his concerns about the homeless problem and the public’s safety.

“He’s a great guy but he might expect a little more out of me than I can perform,” Fox says.

“We will literally drive a homeless guy to a rehab center once he or she says they’ll come. If there’s even a glimmer of hope that they want some service, we’ll get it to them; but these guys are very, very service-resistant, so we’re in maintenance mode, making sure it doesn’t lead to crime,” Fox explained.

The homeless are a big problem with their dysfunction, psychological issues, addictions — problems that defy simple solutions that are humane, problems that can’t be alleviated unless more people adopt Robert the Walker’s “Get Up and Do Something” philosophy. (THIS COLUMN WAS WRITTEN FOR THE GLENDALE NEWS-PRESS)

It is well established in all times and all places that even a little power tends to corrupt, especially when the power derives from being elected to public office.

That’s why it’s so interesting to get to know people right after they have taken the oath of office and to check in with them periodically to see how they are handling the temptations, the pressures and the opportunities that arise when everybody wants to be your friend — especially those who want favors.

With that in mind, I called Zareh Sinanyan, the newest member of the Glendale City Council, elected back in April after a particularly rough campaign in which comments he had made several years earlier on Youtube — hate speech of a racist and homophobic nature — had come back to haunt him and would have cost him the election, were it not for the efforts of the Armenian National Committee.

Not everybody in town wants to be Sinanyan’s friend; to this day his comments still shadow him. But his colleagues on the council and the city’s officials, as well as most people in the community, have welcomed him, though some have done so with a wary eye.

But no complaints have surfaced about how he has handled himself as an elected official. From perception and the observations of others, he’s not a long-winded blowhard or a tricky fox or a double-crosser; but as a politician, he’s got a lot to learn.

“It was very strange at the beginning,” he said over coffee last week as we talked about his first four months in office and his intentions for the future.

“Everybody knows more than you, so you try to keep quiet and absorb all you can and learn. I tried to become better informed and reach out to everyone on the dais. They have been great. We have a pretty dynamic relationship together.”

Watching how he handled himself in the tough debates recently on the upcoming electricity rate hikes, which will average about 30% compounded over the next five years, with most of the increase coming this year and next, it was pretty obvious that like every politician, his position had a lot to do with who brought him to the dance — in this case the Armenian National Committee, which strongly lobbied against the hike.

Sinanyan fought for 3% hikes every year and would have gone along with Frank Quintero’s push for 4% a year rather than the 8%, 7%, 5%, 2% and 2% increases that were approved.

With three votes in support of the plan, Sinanyan had a free pass to oppose it, so the issue that simmers too often below the surface in Glendale — the Armenian question — and his reasons for challenging the rate hike became issues that interested me.

“I have found myself in the position where I look after the interests of South Glendale in a way that I’m not sure others do. Drive around and you can see how it’s qualitatively different than North Glendale, where I live, and where people are more affluent. For South Glendale, the increases are a critical issue.”

The increase from $10 to $13 a month for low-income residents was just a “consolation prize, a backdoor solution” — and that’s the kind of thing Sinanyan says he wants to change.

“I ran on a platform that was, ‘Let’s make Glendale better.’ In order to do that, we need to make Glendale more business-friendly and we need to be more transparent,” Sinanyan said. “Let’s be straightforward, let’s be honest about what we’re doing, about what the needs are, about what’s motivating us. What I was saying is that sometime in the next five years, we’re going to raise salaries and then this whole model is going to collapse, so we’ll be having the same rate increase conversation again.”

One goal is to get rid of the transfer to the city’s General Fund of 11% of Glendale Water & Power’s electricity revenue as “surplus” when it clearly is not, since the city’s utility has been running through its reserves and delaying investment. The transfer dates back decades and has never been legally challenged. But activists have kept the controversy over it alive.

“I understand the necessity, that there’s a level of service that the public wants, so we need that money,” Sinanyan added. “What I don’t agree with is the way it’s done. We’re told GWP will be broke by 2017 the way we’re going. But it’s because of the transfer, so in reality, it is Glendale that will be broke, not GWP.

“Why are we playing this game? Let’s be honest. Let’s go to the voters and say you expect X and we’re getting Y amount of money, so to match X with Y, we’re going to need some kind of an increase somewhere.

“Maybe I’m being naïve, maybe I’m too green. I know it’s hard to pass taxes and easy to raise rates. But we should put our time and energy and political capital into this and say, ‘We don’t want to take your money and put it in one pocket and then transfer it to the other pocket to pay someone else.’ That’s where I’m coming from.”

Sinanyan wants to build relationships in all parts of the city to be a “sort of interpreter willing to do whatever it takes” to build bridges.

“I want our city to be known for substantive things because it is a great place to live and do business. This is a great city, but there is a lot of work to do to break down barriers, to help people understand each other better, to make Glendale better for everyone and not at the expense of one group or another.

“Do I know how to do it? Not really; time has its role and you have to be out there in the community.”

Having observed a lot of politicians, big and small, in a lot of places big and small, I can only tell you that politics is like heroin and like most addictions, few survive the experience intact and undamaged. It’s what makes keeping an eye on a newcomer like Sinanyan interesting as he tries to give life to his ideals.

Back when it could have mattered, when a single decision that put the future of the city at risk was being made, Antonio Villaraigosa showed he lacked the courage to lead, his predecessor James Hahn already had shows he was incapable leadership and Councilman Eric Garcetti showed he was lost in a mind fog that haunts him today and threatens his ability to lead the city now that he is mayor.

It was August 2005 and on the table was a contract for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 18, who under boss Brian D’Arcy held the power of political life and death for every politician at City Hall thanks to the generous payroll deductions of the city’s highest paid workers that he used to make and break politicians.

It was a unique contract even by city annals, granting utility workers a guaranteed 3.25 percent raise every year for five years with an inflation escalator that could raise it to 6 percent — a guarantee of 16.8 percent with a lot more possible depending on inflation, as Beth Barrett reported in the Daily News:

“Faced with more than 200 DWP workers wearing T-shirts threatening a strike, the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday approved a controversial five-year contract that gives some of the city’s already highest-paid workers raises of up to 28 percent.

“The contract – approved 10-3 by the council – had been hotly debated for nearly two months, coming amid water-rate hikes, questions about union-wage parity, concerns about the city’s labor negotiating process and threats of a strike by Department of Water and Power workers. ”

The contract was negotiated under Jimmy Hahn’s aegis but he insisted to the compliant LA Times that they correct any reference to it being his responsibility, claiming he voted against it as chair of the negotiating panel although he never used his bully pulpit to stop it.

And so it was left to Villaraigosa to decide what to do.

He knew it was a terrible deal for ratepayers, the DWP and the city and told me so at the time.

But what’s a boy who was once so poor to do when his dreams have come true and he’s just become the mayor of America’s second largest city, will soon be living in a mansion with drivers, bodyguards, cooks, cleaners, servants, hundreds of staffers at his beck and call and have the opportunity to drink $1,000 bottles of wine, sit in the best seats at exciting sports and entertainment events for free, hobnob with the rich and famous and make whoopee with so many beautiful woman.

He signed off on the deal — and why not?

D’Arcy and the IBEW had funded his tough campaign to oust Hahn after one term? Who could take seriously the warnings of all the other city unions about the DWP wage premium or worry that the next recession might be the worst in 75 years?

Tony Cardenas, now a Member of Congress, called the deal “viable and fair” and guided it through the Council with the support of Alex Padilla, now a state senator and wannabe Secretary of State of California, and Wendy Greuel, who went to on to become City Controller and candidate for mayor, only to be defeated in no small part by the lavish spending of D’Arcy and the IBEW on her behalf.

Only one of the three Council voters against the contract is still around, Bernard Parks, and only two of those who voted for it, the irrelevant Tom LaBonge who has lived off the DWP his whole career, and Eric Garcetti, who has danced around the power of the IBEW for years only to find D’Arcy preferred the candidate who was “easiest to manipulate” over himself, the candidate who was “easiest to intimidate,” in this year’s mayoral election.

That is what sets the stage for the showdown over the current proposal for a new four-year contract with the IBEW that the City Council took public Friday.

Council President Herb Wesson paraded out six Council members who represent the Valley as if they give a damn about their community to sanctify the deal and conceal everything wrong with it.

No one is foolish enough to say it’s a bad deal, though only fools or people promised favors would call it “great,” people like VICA, the Valley business group.

In proof of its weakened position, the IBEW was offering to defer the 2 percent raise due in October for four years and to take no raises in the intervening years. The union agreed to screw future employees with a retirement and pension package and wage structures that are more in line with what other city workers get — a deal that leaves literally hundreds of other issues unresolved.

It’s a “start,” everyone who lives off the system agreed, but it’s too late to start all over again.

It has taken decades to create these problems and the clock is ticking. We fix it now or at the least come a lot closer to what is desperately needs or the city where everyone lives on the edge is hanging over the precipice.

Eric Garcetti knows that. He has shaken up the lapdog DWP Commission by replacing four members who represented such special interests such as USC and the environmental green-washers with people who hopefully have a broader sense of public service than serving than people who sign their handsome paychecks.

He knows this is far from the deal the city needs just as Villaraigosa did back in 2005 when SEIU leader Julie Butcher publicly declared:

“During 2004 contract negotiations, city management told [us] there was no money in the budget for raises, and [we] took them at their word . . .

“What should I say to a mechanic who fixes police cars for a living when he makes 20 percent less than a mechanic who works across the street?” I don’t see how I can ever take the city at its word again.”

She didn’t, and is now managing SEIU affairs in Riverside County where a union official who understands our futures are all bound together cannot interfere with the feeding frenzy going on in LA.

Understand her union like others representing civilian workers had given up raises in the because of the continuing fiscal crisis while DWP workers got a 5 percent increase.

“They make choices,,” the bully D’Arcy declared in response back then. “If I brought my members zero, I would be hanging from that rafter over there.”

One can only hope there are rafters high enough and a rope short enough.

Then-Controller Laura Chick captured the popular sentiment at the time, saying: “Too often, the city of Los Angeles has been stuck in a time warp, making decisions in the same way over and over again, without stepping back and asking is this the best way to do this.”

Clearly, the outrageous DWP wage premium went back a long way.

Just since fiscal 1999, DWP workers had gotten 30 percent in salary hikes and civilian workers 25 percent – while the regional consumer price index had risen about 19 percent. It is now documented that the DWP wage premium is 30 and 40 percent higher than workers doing the same job for the city in other departments and close to that for many categories of workers doing the same jobs for other utilities in the region

On Monday night, three days after Wesson’s propaganda event in support of this puny deal, just 75 or so Neighborhood Council activists bothered to show up at City Hall to meet with the bureaucratic architects of the deal at City Hall, Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller and DWP CEO Ron Nichols.

The activists were not in a fighting mood, just asking questions and grumbling.

Despite being on duty as a Naval intelligence officer, Garcetti showed up for a cameo appearance, offered mild words of encouragement and unveiled a petition drive he started called Fix DWP.

“I don’t want to say, two years from now, that we rushed through this,” Garcetti said, suggesting Miller’s analysis that totally obscured key issues was “incomplete.”

“It did not include the importance of the issues that I laid out on work rules, it didn’t do the nuances on the fourth-year raise.”

Exactly. The stench fills the nostrils of every sentient person in the city.

Garcetti for all his ambition to attain higher officer should understand that, should understand that this is his make or break crisis: Four years from now he will be judged on whether he did the right thing now or his political ambitions will be crushed as certainly as Villaraigosa’s were when he could barely avoid a runoff in 2009 against Walter Moore and Zuma Dogg.

D’Arcy is probably correct that LA has neither the stomach nor the attention span to see this through.

There is a golden moment here for Garcetti. Will he will catch it?

It would be tragic for the future of the city if he stops short of getting real change and then faces an alienated and empowered IBEW and its supporters.

He really has one shot, one chance to get it right. He needs to find the guts and to understand that real reform requires confronting the real problem headon and exciting the public to back him.

Dick Riordan failed because he loved the people but didn’t respect them; Hahn failed because it took too much work and imagination to transcend the shadow of his father Kenny Hahn’s outdated “pothole politics,” and Villaraigosa failed because fine wine and fine women meant more to him than fulfilling the hopes and dreams of those who believed and trusted him.

Who Eric Garcetti is will soon be clear.

But he needs to know that if he gives in here, nothing he does for the next four or eight years or for the rest of his life will be anything but ego-satisfying without consequence to the values he says he holds sacred.

But he if finds the strength and courage to win this fight, he gets to tackle the next big issue and the one after that and to build momentum with a growing army of ordinary people from all walks of life and backgrounds who only want a better life for the themselves and their families and neighbors and the city as a whole.

With a chance of greatness, with the opportunity to help LA finally find its soul that brings everyone together, it is unthinkable that Eric Garcetti would make the wrong choice — unthinkable but not impossible.

It was unusual, unprecedented, an historic event symbolizing City Hall’s commitment to transparency, to an open and honest public conversation on an issue of great importance: The outrageous high wages and benefits granted over the years to the Department of Water and Power workers and the outrageous rate hikes imposed on customers, even the 20 percent who get hefty discounts, even the 40 percent hit with huge bills in the summer’s broiling heat San Fernando Valley.

Every element of that sentence represents a triumph for community activists, Neighborhood Councils and everyone else who has cared enough to try to do something to make L.A. a better city despite the reign of havoc of the tyranny of a minority majority that attained near absolute power over processes and information thanks to the bottomless pit of money coming from labor-business-developer special interests that profit handsomely from the public’s business at the public’s expense.

Nothing about the “unusual, unprecedented, historic” event would have been said previously, the event wouldn’t even been held if they weren’t afraid of the people, that something just might trigger a reaction that would awaken the zombied populace to action.

Friday’s joint meeting of two key Council committees was called to discuss in public the proposed deal between the DWP and its union, IBEW Local 18, to clear the way so DWP officials, with the “Rate Payer Advocate” so evidently in tow, could come forward quickly for approval of another series of major rate hikes on top of the 52 percent imposed for electricity in the last six years.

Propagandist Supreme Paul Krekorian, as the Councilman in charge, was proud to pay homage to the “unusual,unprecedented, historic” nature of this “open and transparent” event — words that had never before spoken in such earnestness in this Temple of Democracy, as the mayor describes it.

Assisted by rising City Council star Felipe Fuentes, he led the public and his colleagues through a more than three-hour performance worthy of theatrical awards though it did drag as he went on and on through the drudgery of having each and every highly paid member of the cast of bureaucrats formerly known as public servants — the CLA, the CAO, the CEO, the RPA, the CA — swear allegiance to the story that was so well scripted and choreographed with such attention to detail. It was hard not to wonder why they never work as hard to solve the people’s problems as they do to conceal them.

They intended to leave no openings in the logic and facts presented. Cynics, skeptics and heretics were lying in wait, ready to drive enough truth through such openings to catch the ear and open the minds of a populace so obviously blind to reality, or so oblivious to reality, that they were incapable of reaction to anything one degree less the a gun in the face or a massive earthquake.

Trying to penetrate the false premises and gross omissions of fact among so many other intellectual and moral flaws that seem to be part and parcel to politics these days was meant to be so challenging that few would try and even if anyone got past the numerous layers of deceit, they would find it took so long to explain that only people who already knew the truth would pay attention.

The reason the event was structured as “unusual, unprecedented, historic” was because those people who know the truth about what is wrong have found so many chinks in the armor protecting this concrete fortress that something could go seriously wrong. After all, they have been walking a fiscal tightrope for so long and are so deeply indebted to benefactors that they would sell just anything, cut any deal or say just about anything if they could last another day in hopes of the miracle that could save them from the consequences of their failures, their betrayals of the public trust.

It was a pandering tribute to the risk they face of inflaming public passions, yet some who some who could have shown courage groveled at their feet, some critics sought nothing more than time to talk the issues to death as they have been so comfortable doing for so long and, in a brilliant masterstroke by the Master of Ceremonies Herb Wesson, they were all reduced to being a claque clapping on his cue for the very people they should be shunning.

It has been more than 20 years, through at least three major recessions and four mayors, since DWP workers went without raises — some years getting 5.9 percent more, every year getting more, leaving everyone else on the city payroll, even cops and firefighters, and employees in other utilities, green with envy.

But this was different and everybody who profits from the public’s willingness to pay high taxes and fees and endure soaring rates was delighted by what’s good about the deal: The IBEW is willing to defer its 2 percent raise due in October for four years, agree to tougher pension rules and lower salaries for new employees only and accept at least a few of the reforms on pensions that other city unions have lived with since the recession hit five years ago — but not health care, overtime or more than 600 special advantages they enjoy among so many other issues.

“It’s a start,” said one city official after another.

The same sentiment was echoed by even the most critical and passionate opponents but they all added it was not an end, not a solution to what is broken. It is after all based on nothing but the same kinds of tinkering that has perpetuated this fiscal catastrophe for five years without an end in sight unless you believe the city’s fanciful claims based on nothing but the dream that L.A. will become the greenest, cleanest, most wonderful big city in the world, the No. 1 destination for everyone with money to spend in search of the greatest time of their life and for everyone without two pennies to rub together to try to do great things and find happiness and freedom.

The fatal flaw is that the deal on the table doesn’t solve the city’s or the DWP’s problems because it is based on the city’s failed policies over years. It is based on a hope and a prayer that 30 years from now, somehow, a miracle perhaps, everything will turn out just right with public employees wages and benefits in line with the revenue streams that treat everyone fairly and with high-quality services that engender a feeling across all the divisions of being part of something greater than ourselves.

But they had to admit the deal on the table would mean less than a 2 percent reduction in water and power rate INCREASES over the next four years — a period in which ratepayers are girding for hikes of 20 or 30 or even 40 percent. It’s better but it’s nowhere near good enough.

There’s no mystery to why it’s not good enough: Once an employer takes off the table the possibility of give-backs and wage reductions and real reforms of benefits and work rules, what leverage is there? Only to give away more, never less.

And that’s why the big lie they told matters so much.

Under the law, employers and unions are required to negotiate in good faith and provide a factual rationality to their positions. But if nothing comes of the negotiations, the employer can declare an impasse and impose its “last, best and final offer” as Glendale did to the IBEW union in union after long unfruitful negotiations. The offer cut everyone’s pay 1.75 percent and it stays in effect until the conflict is resolved.

It doesn’t work that way in L.A. — or so every official involved swore on a stack of reports and studies.

All those highly paid bureaucrats who said exactly what the Council wanted to hear agreed that L.A. has such a cumbersome procedure for reaching an impasse and imposing wage and benefits conditions that a year would pass and under the city’s rules a new round of negotiations would have to start and take most of a year, meaning they could never reach the end point of imposing the “last, best and final offer.”

The two committees that met jointly were the Budget and Finance Committee — Krekorian, Englander, Koretz, Blumenfield and Bonin — and Energy and Environment — Fuentes, Blumenfield, LaBonge, Huizar and Koretz.

Could it be a coincidence that the Westsider Bonin and the Eastsider Huizar were nowhere in evidence, leaving only the six Council members from the Valley — members who with Nury Martinez carve up the Valley into demographic cohorts that dilute the representation of less than 40 percent of the city’s population by giving them nearly 50 percent of the Council members, all them beholden to special interests mainly over the hill?

It was not a mistake that this was the case. Council President Herb Wesson, driving for a rapid approval of a half-loaf deal — instead of the real deal that is sitting there for the taking — made it clear at the outset that it’s the Valley that could upset everything and that’s why he produced this spectacle.

As someone who has created a vast body of journalism relevant to what is being raised for nearly 30 years, I can say with certainty that the Valley no longer has any significance in the politics of Los Angeles. There is no leadership. There is no sense of place. There is no vehicle for the desperately needed conversation that could save the remnants of the middle class from city policies.

And that’s what makes so significant the comments made to the City Council by the Valley business community’s spokesman, Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association.

Neighborhood Council leaders and community activists, even the all-powerful Central City Association, all testified to the Council that the deal on the table was a start but it was not good enough. More needs to be done and more time needs to be taken.

Yet, with six Valley Council members as witnesses, all of them elected on the power of money from the outside, the Valley business community called the deal “incredible” and “a great start that really could change the face of the city … it needs to be done by Oct. 1.”

That was an important goal of this farce: Disarming the Valley.

But not so fast. There is a surprising twist that leaves an opening for people all over the city from every walk of life and every political stripe to rise above the banality of what is on the table and recognize that we are at a critical crossroads that demands we rise above the b.s. and see how our lives and fortunes are bound together.

I have hardly written anything for a long time because I have beaten the horse of LA corruption to death and have nothing further to say, convinced that calamity is a certainty and that tragically it will be the most vulnerable who suffer, not the perpetrators.

Eric Garcetti has taken a stand against this half-loaf deal and shaken up the DWP Commission with four new appointees, including Jills Banks Barad, founder and longtime head of the Valley of Neighborhood Councils, She was one of Garcetti’s appointees to the DWP board year still had the courage to testify Friday that we need a better deal.

If you will not mobilize across this city now for a chance to demand real reforms of the DWP and of every aspect of the way the city is run, when will you do it?

This is a tale of two cities — yours and mine, each with its own water and power utility companies.

In your city, base rates for electricity did not go up for six years until the City Council narrowly approved a plan last week to raise rates by nearly 29% compounded over five years amid warnings that the utility could go broke by 2017

In my city, rates soared more than 50% during that same period of time with near unanimous votes of City Council every time in the face of warnings the utility could go broke without the money. Hefty increases are planned for the next five years as well.

In your city, Glendale Water & Power employees worked without a contract for two years, suffered the indignity of having their wages unilaterally cut by the city in June, and faced a significant reduction in the number of workers.

In my city, utility workers have gotten huge pay raises year after year — up to 6% for five years and as much as 4% more recently, even as many other city workers were getting nothing and having to pay more for pensions and health care. In addition, as many as 1,400 city workers were transferred to the L.A. Department of Water and Power to protect their jobs when the city’s General Fund was running out of money.

You live in Glendale, which has a long history of fiscal responsibility.

I live in Los Angeles, which has a long history of fiscal irresponsibility.

Lucky you, unlucky me!

“Our employees haven’t had cost-of-living increases since 2008. We have shared the increase in medical 50-50,” City Manager Scott Ochoa told the Council during last week’s debate on rate hikes.

“When you consider that our employees pay a greater share of their own employment than anybody in this region, and possibly anybody in the state, it will ultimately have an impact when raises are being given at different levels on three sides of us,” Ochoa said.

“It’s a situation where if we can’t afford it, we can’t give it,” he added, “and if we can’t give it, we’re telling our employees just not to ask for it. The council expressed its leadership on the subject by imposing on IBEW. And that has had its reverberations, not even in Glendale, but throughout the region still today.”

Glendale’s tough stand in the face of demands by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 18, has indeed reverberated in my city, where giving into the union’s bully boss Brian D’Arcy has become a fact of life and led to an astronomical IBEW wage premium.

Historically, in L.A., negotiations with the IBEW have amounted to nothing more than blackmail.

D’Arcy puts on the table a long series of demands for outrageous increases in wages and benefits and threatens to strike and cut off water and power in the nation’s second-largest city.

Officials elected with IBEW campaign cash, or those who fear that union money may be used against them, surrender quickly.

This time around, D’Arcy has given the city an ultimatum: Officials have until Sept. 1 to approve his offer for a new four-year contract, although the current contract doesn’t expire until a year after that.

It’s a sign of the changing times that the offer would defer the 4% raises due this October, saving $25 million, until the last year of the new contract and there would be no raises until then, although it will do nothing to solve the wage disparities with other city workers who also aren’t going to get wage increases.

City Council President Herb Wesson, the former Assembly Speaker who helped create massive deficits in the state, and his colleagues — most of them beholden to the IBEW for their positions — are in a mad rush to approve the deal quickly.

Wesson canceled the council’s regular meeting Friday to hold an extraordinary joint committee hearing to stage a public relations event to sell the deal so it can be approved rapidly without any serious independent analysis.

But the Glendale reverberation is fully in evidence.

Neighborhood Councils are holding an unprecedented citywide Town Hall meeting on Monday to discuss the situation. Activists who have played a major role in recent years in successfully pushing for reforms within the L.A. Department of Water and Power, including creation of a rate payer advocate, have called for a 90-day delay for further study and to organize opposition.
For his part, Mayor Eric Garcetti has signaled that IBEW’s proposal doesn’t go anywhere far enough to bring LADWP wages in line with other city workers or workers in other utilities.

And newly-elected City Controller Ron Galperin — the only independent voice serving in city elective office — dropped a bombshell on Thursday by releasing a report that exposed just how big the IBEW wage premium is.

Base salaries for utility workers at just under $95,000 a year are $216 higher than those for police and fire employees, but they get 16.6% more in overtime and other premiums compared to 9.2% extra for public safety workers and 1.2% for civilian employees.

On average, IBEW members are paid 20% to 40% more than civilian employees even when they do the same jobs like garage attendants, janitors and accountants.

Much of the wage disparity is caused by existing contract provisions that include more than 600 separate pay codes for overtime, hazardous situations, meal reimbursements, and bonuses for inclement weather, cement work and operating special equipment, Galperin reported.

It’s a hopeful sign that the reverberation from Glendale’s stand has helped spark even this much debate, but it will test the new mayor’s toughness and the community’s ability to mobilize opposition to stop the City Council from accepting an offer made out D’Arcy’s “generosity,” as one member newly-elected with nearly $90,000 in IBEW money called it, warning that rejection could trigger “anger, frustration, disappointment and that can turn into a strike.”

It’s the same old tough luck story for the public: Give them the money or they strike.

City Manager Scott Ochoa, armed with graphs and pie charts and a thousand details, spent 55 minutes offering a “relatively brief presentation” explaining why electricity rate hikes averaging 26 percent over the next five years are necessary or Glendale’s century-old utility will “effectively be out of business as we have come to know it.”

His efforts silenced skeptics such as the Glendale Chamber of Commerce at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting, kept harsh critics like Herbert Molano from even bothering to attend and convinced the Board of Realtors to get aboard the plan for increases of 8%, 7%, 5%, 2% and 2% each year through 2017 — increases Ochoa insisted would put Glendale Water & Power on a healthy economic footing, improve service, meet rising state and federal standards and lead to only modest future rate hikes.

Here was one of the most important decisions that the City of Glendale, its 200,000 residents, thousands of businesses and its political leadership will make for a long time to come and it was left to the Armenian National Committee and its supporters, along with a handful of other residents, 32 in all, to publicly speak for everyone.

Not that anyone cared very much, with only 189 viewers tuning into the Council meeting online compared to the 2,462 viewers of the July 9 meeting where the Korean “comfort women” statue was being discussed.

Mostly, those who came attacked the plan as too expensive for the poor to afford — three bucks more a month. They argued it’s totally unnecessary — all the city has to do is stop raking $21 million off the top of electricity revenues and transferring it to the city’s General Fund and the utility would be in fine shape.

But as Ochoa put it: “The impact on the General Fund would be crippling,” noting that across-the-board cuts to make up for the lost revenue would mean eliminating 40 cops, 24 firefighters and cutting library, parks and community service programs sharply.

The frustration of ordinary citizens that had surfaced during a series of meetings around town was best put by Annie Jensen, an elderly woman in a wheelchair who rents an apartment near Pacific Park.

“This rate increase is going to affect our lives profoundly,” she said. “It’s going to affect every aspect of our lives…. I don’t have any solutions, but I’m just very uncomfortable with this rate increase…. I would just like you to keep uppermost in your minds the greatest good for the greatest number.”

It was the right point to make.

Glendale Water & Power has gone without an increase in base electricity rates for five years. It has been operating at a loss, has put off critical investments in infrastructure and even reduced rates during the recession.

Efforts to raise rates last year fizzled when the council got cold feet, although it was clear Tuesday that a slim majority was willing to back the front-end-loaded increases this time around.

But Councilman Frank Quintero announced he was “not persuaded” that the utility’s financial situation was as dire as it was portrayed and that the proposal “for me, it just doesn’t work.” Increases of more than 3 or 4 percent would be a hardship for too many people, he said.

Councilman Zareh Sinanyan, the council’s newest member, said he felt like “a gun is being put to my head” to approve the rate hikes when he really wanted to go back to the drawing board and reconsider everything about how the city operates.

This is what makes being a close observer of the machinations of public officials so amusing and infuriating: What they say in public often has little or nothing to do with what the issue is or what they really believe. It’s just politics and they are politicians who play to the crowd, one way or another.

In this case, it was easy to duck the hard question of what is the “greatest good for the greatest number” since it already was clear that Mayor Dave Weaver and council members Ara Najarian and Laura Friedman were ready to approve the rate hikes this week when the critics announced their opposition.

“At this point at the conclusion of the great recession, there are no easy tradeoffs to make,” Ochoa had said, anticipating the questions that would be raised.

“You cut $10 million three years ago, $18 million two years ago, $15 million last year from the General Fund. You’ve reduced your payroll from 1,842 employees 18 months ago down to 1,588 fulltime employees. It has not been at that level since the mid-1990s … we are extremely streamlined and lean, as an organization.”

Glendale Water & Power is in financial trouble after several year of losses, so “if we were to do absolutely nothing … by 2017-18, we would need to do something by way of divestiture or opt into some kind of regional type of joint-powers agreement to provide electrical service to our customers … in any event, we are effectively out of business as we have come to know it.”

It was a dire warning that Quintero dismissed out of hand, saying “I guarantee this utility will not go bankrupt.”

Friedman dismissed his guarantee, noting that even with the 8% increase this year, customers will be paying lower base rates than they did five years ago, thanks to a 10% reduction imposed during the height of the recession.

Even with the proposed increase this year, she noted, Glendale’s total rate hike since 2007 will come to 12.5% compared to Burbank’s 17%, Pasadena’s 31% and Los Angeles’ whopping 52%. For its part, Southern California Edison, the private utility, is seeking approval by the Public Utilities Commission of increases of more than 16% this year.

The reason we’re in this position is the utility has lowered rates at a time when its expenses have gone up,” Friedman said. “Now, we may have to sell the utility if we continue on this track. If we do a 2% or 3% rate increase, we’ll sell this utility in a few years … we will be in a place where this utility is bankrupt. Going slow is what has brought us here.”

If there are alternatives, opponents have until Tuesday night to come up with them — otherwise sharply rising electricity bills are as much a certainty as the lights coming on when you flip the switch.

The No on 710 coalition of groups that cuts across community and demographic lines from the Eastside of Los Angeles to the affluent hillsides of La Canada-Flintridge posted this statement with a 35-minute video of last Thursday’s meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Authority Board:

“Mike Anotonvich tries to sabotage Ara Najarian’s motion by having the county attorney claim ‘client attorney privilege regarding who make the final decision on the SR710 tunnel. The public has right to know & not let this backroom BS continue.”

Hard to beat the poetic force of those words.

Najarian, the Glendale Councilman and stalwart opponent of digging twin multi-billion tunnels more than four miles from Alhambra to Pasadena, submitted a motion and an amendment back in April demanding a full explanation of what’s going on with regards to the 710 extension that has been stymied for 60 years.

He wanted to know whether Caltrans or the MTA is in charge and whether there is a contractual relationship justifying the expenditures of tens of millions of dollars for an environmental impact study and massive community outreach program.

As I watched the video of the meeting provided by Joe from El Sereno for the No on 710 activists, I was struck by what was going on in the background.

Every time I looked up, there was the aging Zev Yaroslavsky — the man who coulda and shoulda been mayor of Los Angeles six or seven times over in the last 30 years — and the young newly-elected mayor Eric Garcetti in an intense mostly one-sided conversation.

As a guy whose support might have been more valuable than a former President, woman Senator or the fabulously rich or fabulously powerful like the unions, Yaroslavsky chose to avoid the hardships of battle as he has done for so long in so many ways.

“I have remained neutral in this election in thought, word and deed.”

But now that the election is over and an easily manipulated mayor is in place, Yaroslavsky appears in this video excerpted at various points in the 35-minute banter discussion of why the nature of the relationship between Caltrans and the MTA is top secret, too hot for the public to handle, like spying on our phone calls and emails and snail mail and bank accounts and credit card charges and …National security is all that matters in a nation of frightened little people who protect themselves pretending they are zombies — or maybe they are.

It would seem the termed out Yaroslavsky has found his calling as a mentor to Garcetti, who was attending his first meeting of the MTA, as important a political body as there is because that’s where the money is.

But I digress: The questions before the MTA board posed by Najarian (710- Montion April 25, 2013.)three months ago simply sought what would seem like simple answer: What’s the deal and why after all this time isn’t it clear with regards to the 710 extension?

Brilliantly — if you enjoy the tactics employed by dictatorial governments around the world, at least those that need to pretend they have some legalistic legitimacy — was the ruse chosen by the MTA to avoid public discussion of knowledge of what’s up.

They had their lawyer Charles Safer, who is actually the county’s lawyer rather than the MTA’s, respond to Najarian in writing so they could invoke the attorney-client privilege exemption under the California Public Records Act and keep their misfeasance and possible malfeasance from the public.

It is a specious assertion they made, one I challenged on Friday with emails demanding in emails to all board members and top MTA officials that they release the document in question under the CPRA as a matter of urgency. I haven’t heard back from any of them.

But I’ll bet you umpteen millions of dollars of Measure R taxpayer money that the money does its best to justify the lack of a legal relationship between the MTA and the state and to offer hollow arguments why illegality in the name of expediency is the only way they can move forward and trample on the rights and interests of hundreds of thousands of people.

You can read the transcript of what transpired during the MTA meeting on the subject (710 Transcript – Regular Board July – Item 60) or watch the start of the segment where a flabbergasted Najarian struggles to remain professional in the face of the indifference of others who dare to call themselves public servants.

The moral premise of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18 as often expressed by union boss Brian D’Arcy is clear and to the point:

“My responsibility is to look after the welfare of my members.”

That narrow worldview puts the IBEW on par with greedy bankers, polluting corporations and so many others in this narcissistic era and it has worked pretty well for employees of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Through good times and bad, they have gotten raises every year for the past eight years, sometimes as much as 5.9%, and overall make as much as 40% and 50% more than others in the city workforce.

In 2010, that promise of huge raises lured Glendale Water & Power workers to pull out of the Glendale City Employees Assn. and join Local 18.

But instead of pay raises, they have gotten pay cuts. And three years later, they don’t have a contract — which isn’t exactly looking after the welfare of members very well.

That’s what prompted Greg Strong to get the 20 other power plant operators to join him in signing cards to pull out of the IBEW and form their own labor organization, the Glendale Power Assn.

On Wednesday at a hearing before City Manager Scott Ochoa that is required under city ordinance, Strong got to make his case for recognizing his breakaway union, the IBEW got to state why their petition should be denied and other city unions got to have their say.

“We would prefer to choose our unit, our own representatives, our own organization. We have demonstrated that we can better represent ourselves,” Strong told Ochoa. “If we get recognized, I know these guys are ready. We feel we can best represent ourselves.”

Pressed to explain why other Glendale utility workers, especially maintenance and others who work at the power plant were not involved, Strong said there was interest from a lot of workers besides the operators but they are waiting to see what happens.

Local 18 under D’Arcy’s leadership has earned a well-deserved reputation as a bully, threatening to shut off the water and power supply to L.A.’s four million people if city officials — many elected with millions of dollars from the IBEW — didn’t give into his demands.

His extortion tactics have created a “DWP wage gap” and contributed to soaring water and power rates even as L.A. deals with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and a poverty rate of more than 25 percent.

The “intimidation factor” was clearly in evidence at Wednesday’s hearing both inside and outside the City Council chamber.

In the hallway, IBEW assistant business manager Gus Corona confronted Craig Hinkley, president of the Glendale City Employees Assn., for daring to suggest that all employees should “have the ability to be represented by those they feel most comfortable with” and for offering to welcome the power plant operators back into the fold if they want to rejoin.

In front of several witnesses, Corona threatened “to get” the city employee union and its president, an apparent violation of state law protecting public employees.

For his part, IBEW lawyer Bill Heine, chose to ignore the ground rules set out by Ochoa at the outset and repeated numerous times: This was not an adversarial hearing but a chance for each side to present their point of view and the facts supporting their position.

Signaling his intention to sue if the IBEW doesn’t win, Heine brought a court reporter with him and disrupted the proceedings dozens of times with objections about relevancy and materiality, demanded the right to cross-examine witnesses and called for Ochoa to be removed because of bias although the city has taken no position on the issue.

In fact, that was what the hearing was about, to hear presentations from all interested parties so Ochoa can decide, based on legal criteria, whether to recognize the renegades.

Under the city’s employee relations ordinance, a new union should be recognized by the city based on meeting a series of specifics such as assuring “employees the fullest freedom in the exercise of their rights” as well as their community of interest, the effect on efficiency of operations and the impact on the job classification structure.

Heine would have none of it, saying at the end of his lengthy presentation, “If there are any other presentations here, I should have the right to respond to those.”

“The process I outlined at 8:30 is the process we’re talking about here at 10:30,” Ochoa said, making it clear that he should make whatever statement he wants “here today right now.”

Ochoa finally lost his patience as Heine repeatedly interrupted Strong and Don Dorroh, vice president of the Glendale Power Assn., with objections to just about everything they said.

“If you would like, sir, what we can do at this point in time is to allow you to excuse yourself because you will still be allowed to make a written statement to us encompassing all of your past… fury about the inappropriateness of the statements and testimony provided by these two employees …

“Would you like to clear the room, would you like to clear the room. Then please, then please, hold on you will be able to make every objection within that written statement.”

It was all just theater to intimidate and set up grounds for a costly lawsuit. You can be sure that whatever decision Ochoa makes after receiving written submissions on Aug. 19 that he will do everything he can to make it defensible under city and state law.

Joanne Nuckols has put the people she calls “transportation bullies” in their place for decades.

She reels off the long, sordid history of South Pasadena’s fight against extending the 710 Freeway through her town, lawsuit by lawsuit, injunction by injunction, community action by community action, as the grassroots movement spread to include residents all along the corridor.

On Saturday, Nuckols and dozens of other activists joined by a cadre of elected officials from Glendale, La Cañada, Pasadena and South Pasadena were to stage a rally and press conference at Blair High School in Pasadena before the start of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority‘s community meeting intended to sell the public on the virtue of a multi-billion-dollar, four-mile tunnel from Alhambra to Pasadena.

It has been a tough sell for 60 years, but transportation officials keep trying, with the full support of those who would benefit most: the engineers, contractors, truckers, unions as well as the politicians they keep in office.

“It’s so exciting to be involved, it’s like a revolution,” said Nuckols, who has been active on transportation issues almost since she and her husband moved to town in the late 1960s. “They treated us like we were just a little fly they could swat away. The defining moment came in ’73 when we got the first injunction against the freeway.”

Saturday’s protest, coming on the 14th anniversary of yet another injunction that blocked freeway construction, was called because of the fire that occurred a week ago in the northbound tunnel connecting the Pasadena Freeway to the I-5 when a tanker spilled 8,500 gallons of gas and set off an inferno, causing damage that will take a long time to repair.

A similar fire occurred six years ago in Santa Clarita when two dozen trucks crashed and burned in the southbound I-5 bypass tunnel — an event that prompted Nuckols and other activists to create a banner and yard signs to show “what can go wrong in a tunnel.”

Doug Failing, who was regional Caltrans director at the time of that crash but joined Metro as its highway construction expert after passage of the Measure R sales tax for transportation, is the target of much of the criticism from the No on 710 activists.

“You ask questions and you get no answers,” Nuckols said. “It’s like they’re tone deaf. They try to feed us this pablum, but we’re not eating it. They just ignore the fact that those tunnels should never be built and will never be built.”

The anti-freeway movement gained momentum and much broader support last summer when Metro included a possible tunnel or surface route on Avenue 64 through much of L.A.’s Eastside and the San Rafael neighborhood in west Pasadena.

All along the route, people got organized and forced Metro to abandon the plan that affected them directly. But they didn’t stop there; they kept working with other neighborhoods to pack meeting after meeting to challenge transportation officials, the community relations firm they hired and their technical experts, as well as rounding up support from the Pasadena City Council as well as La Cañada-Flintridge and Glendale officials.

The coalition now has multiple websites as well as Twitter and Facebook accounts to keep everyone informed and involved.

“It’s very multilayered and complicated, but we have different guerrilla groups that go out and deal with different issues as part of the overall umbrella group.” Nuckols said.

“What’s so incredible is we get no response from Metro to the information and questions we raise,” she added. “That’s one of their big problems. They think we’re going to go away, but our group is just growing.”

One of the strongest supporters of the No 710 Action Committee’s campaign has been former Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, who reached out to Nuckols even before he first ran for a seat on the La Cañada-Flintridge City Council.

“The fight against the 710 has turned from a local issue into a regional issue of significant importance precisely because of the mounting public activism and the horrible approach taken by proponents,” said Portantino, one of the political figures who was slated to be at Saturday’s protest.

“Nothing gets folks more engaged and active than a poorly acted charade and MTA’s advocacy for a project that most folks feel will negatively impact the San Gabriel Valley and the city of Los Angeles,” Portantino added. “As a result, neighbors from across the region are seizing the moment, the initiative and making a difference.”

With a new L.A. mayor in Eric Garcetti, who is on the record as opposing the tunnel and has hired former Pasadena Mayor Rick Cole, a long-time 710 opponent, as a top aide, the Metro board has the votes to kill the tunnel project once and for all and end the waste of tens of millions of dollars on something that is never going to happen.

In this rare case, where the people have gotten so well-organized, so informed, so strong, it should be clear that they are going to keep on truckin’ against the 710 gap project for as long as it takes.

The “transportation bullies” and the greed merchants who want this should be shown the door and the $780 million set aside for this boondoggle should be used to expand rail and rapid bus service in the region, synchronize lights and take other steps to improve the flow of traffic and movement of people.

That’s what people want, the people who pay the bills for all of this.